Thriving with Autism

Meltdowns: triggers vs. root cause

Once upon a time, I thought I could stop a meltdown. I thought there must be some strategy that I could learn, some consequence I could impose, SOMETHING I could DO to just make it STOP.

Karla must have laughed so hard the first time I asked for her advice on this! But she patiently, through many of my panicked texts and emails, redirected me away from the idea that I could handle it in the moment and toward the concept of root cause.

Now I know that I can no more stop a meltdown than I can stop a train. Trying to stop it is a lot like jumping onto the tracks and waving your arms. If the conductor sees you at all, he’s going to feel really bad about plowing through you, but plow through you he will because there is nothing else he can do. And he would be justified in blaming you for putting yourself in the way.

Let me sidestep for just a minute and make sure everyone knows what I am talking about when I say meltdown. I’m not talking about a temper tantrum, which is a child’s deliberate attempt to get what he wants by throwing a fit. A meltdown is a complete loss of self control. Neither threat of the most feared consequence nor promise of the most coveted reward will stop it. It happens because the child has no more ability to cope, but the demands on him have not stopped, whether in the form of tasks, behavior expectations, sensory input, or anything else that costs him tokens.

So, back to me, standing on the train tracks, begging Karla for a way to stop the train. She would ask me what had caused the meltdown and I would describe what had triggered it (which could be anything–a simple question, an accidental touch, being out of his favorite snack). No, she would say, what was the root cause? I’d think back a little farther to something that had preceded the trigger (an argument with his brother, a bad day at school). Still no. Think back farther, she’d say. Has he been sleeping well? Was he healthy? How was his diet? Had he been getting any exercise? Was he spending too many tokens at school? I’d begin to feel like she wasn’t listening, that she didn’t understand that I was in mid-crisis here and I needed help! I couldn’t do anything about those things RIGHT NOW. This train was barreling down on me and I needed to stop it RIGHT NOW!

Today I understand that Karla was trying to pull me off the tracks. Whatever had triggered the meltdown didn’t matter. What mattered was that Nick had no more tokens, and the drains on his supply began long before the trigger hit.

So why had he run out of tokens? Had he spent too many on something, or started the day without a full supply? Figure that out and I’d have root cause. Figure out root cause and I’d get fewer meltdowns.

But where did that leave me in mid-crisis? Where was the solution in the moment?

There wasn’t one. If the meltdown was already in progress, all I could do was get out of the way.

It was a hard lesson to learn. I felt like simply stepping back and allowing a meltdown to happen was like saying sure, go ahead and scream and throw things, call me names, that’s fine with me. But when I finally came to understand that he really had no control over his behavior at that moment, it was easier to accept that I had no control over it either.

Instead of trying to force him to stop, my job is to make sure he is safe, but otherwise to disengage. Any input that he receives from me just demands more tokens that he doesn’t have and prolongs the meltdown. This is true even if he is trying to engage me. Some meltdowns come with verbal expression that may tempt me to argue back, explain, try to get him to see reason. This is not the time to discuss, answer, or demand. It’s not the time to take seriously, or personally, anything that he says.

If I can see the meltdown coming, I may be able to get him to a safe place (like his room) where he can explode in private. It’s easier on whoever else is in the house, and it’s easier on him, too, because he will be protected from all input.*

Meanwhile, I look back to root cause. Again, whatever triggered the meltdown is not the same thing. He melted down because he ran out of tokens. I need to figure out why he ran out of tokens. That is the root cause of the meltdown. When he was melting down constantly because school was costing him too many tokens, we changed how he does school. If I realize that I forgot to give him an afternoon snack, I get one ready and add a reminder to my daily to-do list so I won’t forget again. If I’m not sure why he ran out of tokens, I have to figure it out. In any case, I reduce demands on him until we regain balance.

Meltdowns hurt. No one wants to have them. They are painful and stressful for the people experiencing them, whether they are the ones having a meltdown or the ones present during someone else’s meltdown. It takes time to recover from them. I believe it is crucial for the health of an autistic person to keep them to a minimum. (I should note that adults have meltdowns too and the same concepts apply.)

Avoiding meltdown triggers just leads to me walking on eggshells around my son, avoiding an ever-growing list of things that took his last token while not actually reducing meltdowns. Looking for root cause, and using it to structure our lives in a way that maintains token balance, has been far more helpful. Plus, Nick is learning to understand root cause so that eventually he will be able to manage his own meltdown prevention.

Once upon a time, I thought that by “allowing” meltdown behavior, I was reinforcing it and thereby encouraging more of it. I tried to stop every meltdown in its tracks, and he was having meltdowns every day.

Now, I focus on prevention. If that fails and they happen anyway, I do nothing to try to stop them. The result is that meltdowns are now much less frequent in my house. Once again, the solution was to flip my thinking around.

*Self-injurious behaviors add another aspect to the meltdown and affect the balance between disengaging and keeping the child safe. This post presumes the meltdown behavior is not dangerous to the child or other people.

It’s not necessarily about overall energy levels. It’s about how hard a person has to work to cope with or process the everyday tasks and experiences of life. If you imagine two people who start their day with the same number of tokens, the autistic person will use more of them throughout the day and risks running out of them sooner. What his energy level looks like when he runs out is a very individual thing. He may be exhausted and just want to sleep. He may be restless and need to run a few miles to recharge his token supply. Having a full supply of tokens doesn’t necessarily mean that he is full of physical energy. It means that he has sufficient ability to cope with the demands of life.

Thanks for a great post! Love the train analogy! Great how you relate your fears of hopping out of the way…and of looking for ways of circumventing the issue, and of noting how your child is beginning to recognize root cause- that alone is reason to rejoice!

Funny how your token theory match my “patience points”
When my kids were little I explained to them I had a finite amount of “patience points”
When they presented annoying behavior – whining, fighting among themselves whatever – I would ask:
Is this behavior worth my patience points?
Some times the answer was no and we would use my remaining patience to go to a park instead…
Sometimes the answer was yes. I respected that very much so. I taught them that some causes are worth standing for. It taught them the value and the cost if those causes and that they were important too.
It also allowed me to raise my kids in a more respectful and peaceful environment. I don’t have autism, just, many, many traits ;) but i believe that the finite amount of patience is true for everyone – specially parents! I don’t remember last time my autistic kid had a meltdown and he is a 17 year old hormone bag!
As for the previous comment about autistic people having less energy or less endurance… I don’t believe so. I believe they just have different buttons to push
It absolutely does not cost me anything to cut the label from the back of the tee shirt for my (non autistic son) but it saves quite a few patience points from him! Surprisingly my autistic son could not care less about the labels but having strobing lights oh my! Patience points run fast on that issue!

I don’t believe that autistic people have less energy or endurance, but that they spend more tokens than most people do on the same tasks. Going to the store, for example, causes Nick to spend more tokens than I would because of the sensory input he has to process, leaving him with lower energy afterward than I have (assuming we both started out about the same).

My NT daughter is also the one who needs her clothing tags cut out. :-)

Lovely post. Great explanation of meltdown and I love the distinction between trigger and root cause. My boy is only 7 and holds his stuff together like a champ at school (aka uses ALOT of tokens) and this could really help us, help him, to have enough tokens left so that the transition from school is not so rough.

This is so helpful. We are taking the steps to get my son diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome … Reading blogs like this make me feel so much at home with other parents. Up until this point, parenting my son, I felt alone…now, reading others experiences, I feel like I can parent him better. Thank you!!!

Wow. This is incredible. I have an 8 year old son who is going down the path of being diagnosed as Aspergers. I too, find prevention the easier option. His “outbursts” always happen for a reason, and I try and make sure to prevent them. His behaviour always comes down to lack of sleep, lack of food or sensory overload. Sometimes there are triggers, but more often there are root causes. I also find if my son is coming down with a cold, his behaviour sky rockets! Its really refreshing to hear that its not just us going through this. I am new to this whole Aspergers thing. Its been a very hard parenting ride! Especially when all the “professionals” in our lives have been incredibly unsupportive – saying the reason he behaves this way or that way – is my fault as a mum and somehow I have caused his outbursts. Thanks for what you have written – its been very helpful to me as a mum.